Eventually, Should Trump's Enablers Be Forgiven? Or Should They Be Harshly Dealt With?

Yesterday, Philip Rotner wrote that the MAGA judge who managed to grab the stolen documents case, Aileen Cannon, and has been sabotaging it may be in trouble. She inadvertently just gave Jack Smith “a gift that he desperately needed: a fresh opening to seek her removal from the case... [another of her] bizarre, legally inexplicable pro-Trump orders.” No one knows for sure if she’s too stupid to be a judge or “a cynical MAGA loyalist.” She’s obviously both and shouldn’t just be removed from this case, but from the bench. “[H]er pattern of erroneous, one-sided rulings consistently favoring Trump,” wrote Rotner, “has to send chills down Smith’s spine. He doesn’t need to know what she will do, only what she can do: She can kill his case with the stroke of a pen. If Smith wants to save his case, he has little choice. He must seek Cannon’s removal… Here’s the bottom line: The mounting evidence suggests that if Cannon isn’t removed from the case, Smith won’t win.”

Cannon is the kind of lowlife, scumbag judge Trump appointed. Almost all of them are like her, although few are as transparent and bungling. It’s enablers like Cannon who are making it easy for Trump to turn the J-6 insurrectionists and coup plotters into fascist martyrs. On Wednesday, Sasha Abramsky wrote that “Usually, at this point in the election process, once the base has been satisfied during the primary season, a candidate starts the long, slow, sometimes awkward pivot back toward the political middle. Trump, by contrast, is veering evermore into the extremes, plunging into political conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric… Trump is, perhaps, at his most incandescently dangerous when talking about the January 6 coup attempt and the efforts by his followers to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.”

Trump is consciously creating a martyr mythology, a stabbed-in-the-back-by-a-fifth-column storyline. It is the same narrative used by the early Nazis to describe those— including Adolf Hitler— imprisoned by the Weimar state after the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. 

…After the effort failed, the Nazi leader was arrested, charged with treason, and in a trial the following February, sentenced to five years in prison. He was, however, pardoned after less than a year behind bars. As they say, the rest is history.

In the subsequent Nazi mythology, the men sentenced to prison after the putsch attempt, as well as for various other violent assaults on Weimar leaders and institutions, became martyrs; instead of the malcontents and violent political extremists that in reality they were, they were painted by Nazi propagandists as heroes who had sacrificed their freedom for a noble cause.

…Trump’s wholehearted embrace of the January 6 coup leaders and his escalating martyrdom language about their fate are part of this chilling political package. Faced with more than half a billion dollars in court-imposed fines, the possibility of some of his marquis properties being seized and the imminent start of at least one of his four criminal trials, Trump is now marshalling an army of the angry and the conspiracy-minded to serve as a battering ram against the legitimacy of the state itself.

Promising to release violent paramilitary supporters— as Trump routinely does these days when pledging to free the January 6 perpetrators on day one— isn’t politics as usual. Rather, it’s an unprecedented embrace of political violence by a candidate who is, yet again, showing that he has no moral limits.

No one has traced Trump’s public descent into antifascism more thoroughly than author and history Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Yesterday she wrote how Trump’s personality cult enables his enablers. “Personality cults require messaging machines and performances that stage the autocrat’s domination of all those around him, up to and including his ritual humiliation of ministers and party elites. Americans have now seen many of these performances first-hand by GOP politicians, and they are all the more pathetic for modeling submission to a man who is not even in power at present… Accepting the leader’s lies and violence ties them to him, making them partners in his crimes and thus vulnerable to being exposed.”

The Big Lie is the basis of his personality cult and the foundation of Trumpism as it stands in 2024. Trump as a wronged figure is fundamental to the victimhood persona that keeps his supporters tied to him, to the twisting of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol into a patriotic and morally righteous act, and to the depiction of the thugs involved in that coup attempt as "hostages" of a tyrannical regime that Trumpism must vanquish.

And since Trump is now selling Bibles, and comparing himself to Jesus, here is my essay on the link between an autocrat’s corruption and claims of his piety. The more his crimes come to light, the more he must surround himself with a halo of purity. It is one of the oldest authoritarian scams, and a mainstay of personality cults.

As the campaign proceeds, look for Trump to emphasize that he is the protagonist of a grand moral drama, and that he alone can save America.

…Conviction means the strongman is exposed as not untouchable, and his aura of invincibility and specialness is shattered as he is held to the same standards as anyone else. In the words of Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump's status as a former president did not give him "the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens."

No other politician has been able to construct such a powerful personality cult while operating in a democracy with an open media environment. Berlusconi came close, but he owned all of Italy's private television networks while he was in office, as well as the major television advertising companies, and he was able to engineer the dismissal of critics from state television.

We can laugh at personality cults and the ridiculous-seeming images of macho leaders they generate, but they are key to the success of strongmen, and can be devastating aids to the weakening and destruction of democracies.